In a wide variety of contexts, video has become an extremely important way to communicate information. For example, in the context of entertainment, videos range from blockbuster movies to short amateur clips uploaded to online video services or social networks. In the context of education, both online and conventional courses may make extensive use of videos to teach relevant content. Videos can also be valuable tools in the context of business, marketing, sales, etc.
It is common for some portions of a video to be more important than others. For example, in a humorous video, the video may be funny because of an event that occurs unexpectedly at a particular point in the video, but may be otherwise unremarkable. In the context of a sports video, the video may be exciting before the scoring of each point, but may be otherwise boring. In the context of education, the segments in which key points are explained may be considered more important than other parts of the video.
When people share and/or comment on a video, they often try to communicate to others the portion of the video that they consider to be most interesting. Typically, this involves manually determining the time-offset, from the start of the video, at which the interesting segment begins, and communicating that time-offset to others. For example, while watching a humorous video, a user may think a particular event within the video is particularly funny. To determine the offset at which the event begins, the user may manipulate a timeline control of the video player to back the player up to the start of the interesting event. Once the timeline control is backed up to the start of the interesting event, the user may make a note of the time offset displayed by the video player. For example, the user may make a note that the funny event starts exactly 3 minutes and 12 seconds into a five minute video.
Once a user makes a note of the time offset of the interesting event, the user may send or post a message, about the video, that mentions the time offset. For example, the user may post a comment about the video, where the comment says “You have to see what happens at 3:12”. Based on this comment, subsequent viewers of the video may be encouraged to keep watching the video until the event occurs at 3:12, or may even be tempted to jump the video player ahead to the timeline position for 3:12, to skip over the less-interesting material.
Using these conventional techniques, communicating the time of interesting events, within a video, is both cumbersome and error prone. For example, the person giving the recommendation typically has to rewind/fast forward the video to the relevant event, and then write down (or memorize) the time offset shown by the player. Then the user has to send a message or post a comment with the time offset. When others attempt to manually fast forward to the location associated with the time offset, it is easy to overshoot or undershoot the mark. For example, with long videos, manipulating the timeline control to jump to a particular location can be quite difficult, because even small adjustments of the timeline control of a long video will cause large jumps.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.